85,000 join Facebook campaign against voluntary Romani lessons in schools
There’s been an unexpectedly negative reaction to a proposal by the
Education Ministry to offer voluntary classes in Romani – the language of
the country’s 300,000 Roma or gypsies – in Czech schools. A Facebook
campaign against the proposal has already attracted over 85,000 supporters,
although the authorities appear undeterred.
Romani teacher Helena Sadílková teaches me some basic phrases in one of
Europe’s oldest languages. Helena is not herself Romani, but she teaches
the language – part of the same family as Hindi and Bengali - to students
at Prague’s Charles University. She was involved in a recent survey of
more than 1,000 Romani schoolchildren, a survey that showed only around 30%
of them were fluent in the language.
Helena Sadílková supports the proposal by the Education Ministry to make
Romani lessons a voluntary part of the Czech school curriculum, but says
it’s also important to realise that there may be resistance among Roma
parents themselves after four decades of official repression under the
Communists.
“Parents were for forty years told by the teachers themselves or the
social workers not to use the language, and they actually accepted the idea
that Romani is a barrier to a good education or even acquiring good Czech.
So if you now come to the parents and try to persuade them, let’s try to
teach Romani to your kids, you’re actually totally reversing the position
that they have taken, and that was taken by the representatives of the
education system.”
The Education Ministry not only wants schools with large numbers of Roma
pupils to be able to study their own language, it also thinks some non-Roma
pupils might be interested as well. So they were unprepared for the huge
response to a Facebook page called “Petition Against Teaching of Romani
in Czech Schools”, which has so far attracted 85,000 fans. Education
Ministry spokesman Tomáš Bouška says the campaign is proof of the need
for more multicultural education in schools, not less.
“It’s a sensitive topic in general, and the only thing that the
Education Ministry can do is introduce more integrated forms of education
that would put both sides together and hopefully explain and declare that
there is no need to fight, there is just need to speak. And what else can
help than language. And as I said, it is just offered for certain
localities, there will be course, we are just at the beginning, but it
doesn’t mean that we are afraid of it or afraid of some groups of people
against it. We have to educate – that’s our mission.”
The Education Ministry has repeatedly stressed the courses will be
voluntary – it will be up to schools to offer them and only if parents,
teachers and children are interested. That message seems not to have got
through, with reports of some parents already contacting schools in
protest, and a Facebook campaign against it likely to exceed 100,000
supporters.
| 
Related articles
Also in section "News"
Most popular articles